Alse Young was the first person recorded in colonial America to be executed for the crime of witchcraft. More than 375 years after she was executed, her absolution may be nigh
Last month a judiciary committee of the state legislature agreed to consider a resolution that would exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut. At a hearing on March 1st William Schloat, a nine-year-old, testified that he wished he had a time machine so he could help the accused.
Many accused of witchcraft were vulnerable. Unmarried pregnant woman were frequent targets. Young, a new arrival, may have been targeted because some thought she caused an outbreak of influenza. Beth Caruso, co-founder of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, made up of amateur historians and descendants, says her husband’s ancestor was found guilty of bewitching a gun that had accidentally killed someone three years earlier, even though she was not there.
Sarah Jack, co-host of “Thou Shalt Not Suffer”, a witch-trial podcast, discovered three years ago that she was a descendant of Winifred Benham, the last person accused of witchcraft in Connecticut. “I was confused,” she says. “I had no idea there were more witch trials in New England outside of Salem.” Schoolchildren learn about the witch trials that took place in neighbouring Massachusetts. Arthur Miller, a playwright, used the trials of 1692 as an allegory of the anti-Communist panic.
Massachusetts has made several efforts to atone. In 1702 the General Court of Massachusetts declared the trials unlawful. A decade later the state overturned the convictions. In 1957 and 2001 more alleged witches were exonerated. Thanks to the efforts of children working on a history project, the last accused witch in Massachusetts was cleared of wrongdoing last summer.
But in Connecticut efforts have been successful only on the local level. The town council in Windsor, where Young lived, exonerated her in 2017. Proponents of the bill hope a history trail remembering those accused would be meaningful. Some say lawmakers have more pressing matters to deal with than exonerating those dead for nearly four centuries.
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